Hospitals

Microsoft is unveiling new health care software that will give you a glimpse of your own medical records online.

The company on Monday announced its new HealthVault Community Connect software, which is geared toward hospitals interested in helping patients access their own health care history.

Following a hospital stay, you and your personal doctors can view electronic copies of your hospital records online. Using the software, you can also preregister for future hospital appointments using your existing medical information.

You log onto the hospital's patient Web site, said Microsoft, where you can call up physican notes, discharge instructions, prescriptions, … Read more

It all started in 2006, when researchers were studying a young woman considered to be in a vegetative state. Using MRI to scan her brain, they asked her to imagine herself playing tennis and touring her own home, and found that her brain behaved in much the way a normally functioning brain does.

The neuroscientists were shocked into action as news of what may have only been an anomaly prompted families to ask that the researchers study their own loved ones, too.

One of the neuroscientists, Adrian Owen at the University of Cambridge, alongside colleagues at the University of Liege … Read more

A team of engineers and chemists at Brigham Young University has created a silicon microchip they say can reliably detect specific proteins or viruses from even small samples at low concentrations.

Their invention, which is forthcoming in the paper version of the journal Lab on a Chip, works much the way a coin sorter does, only on a microscopic scale, screening for particles purely by size. This renders sample sizes and concentration levels almost irrelevant, because particles are trapped by size, not number, thereby allowing for much earlier detections of viruses.

"Most of the tests that you're given … Read more

It seems that the best way to keep your kids from getting hurt is to get them out of the house.

According to figures from the U.K. government, obtained by the Sun under the United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act, the number of kids under 15 injured while climbing trees, skateboarding, and the like has fallen.

Does this mean that children have become more athletic or less accident-prone? Does it mean they have perfected their tree-climbing and skateboarding skills?

No, it seems that they are simply staying indoors more, glued to their screens like rubberneckers to an overturned … Read more

Microsoft is adding another player to its portfolio of health care offerings.

The software powerhouse said Thursday that it plans to buy Sentillion, a privately held company that supplies software to health care professionals. Microsoft hopes to combine Sentillion's technologies with its own Amalga Unified Intelligence System (UIS). The goal is to offer integrated technology that can help health care providers more easily access patient data from across multiple sources.

As doctors and hospitals ramp up to make better use of e-health technology, they face a confusing array of tools and systems that could make their jobs more difficult. … Read more

It all started when anesthesiologist Vernon Huang wanted to figure out a better way to streamline his billing. How could he bridge the gap between what's written on paper and what must be entered into an electronic database?

Huang, who's clocked in time as a senior manager for health care markets at Apple, designed the application for a digital pen whose tiny camera embedded right next to the ink cartridge captures every stroke of the written word on film and whose images are uploaded wirelessly and automatically to a remote database.

He knew such an invention has a range of applications well beyond billing, and founded Shareable Ink (headquartered in Newton, Mass., with a branch in San Mateo, Calif.). Medgadget caught up with Huang at TedMed and posted a shaky but informative demonstration:

There is, of course, competition.… Read more

When a caregiver leaves a patient's hospital room, or when that patient is transferred from one ward to another, it can be tricky to monitor vital signs without interruption. What if that data all fit on one screen in the palm of the caregiver's hand?

The 120-year-old German medical technology company Drager has built the Infinity Acute Care System to constantly improve hospital processes and procedures, and the suite's new Infinity M540, released at Medica 2009, is designed to make the continuous reading and monitoring of vital signs much easier.

The monitor travels with the patient from … Read more

Cardiac patients undergoing procedures at the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) starting Thursday may find themselves either immersed in a Disney World setting or the African Savannah, with accompanying audio playing in the background. It's part of a testbed project by the center involving Philips' Ambient Experience to soothe patients through the intimidating clinical process of preparation, examination, treatment, and post-procedure.

The Ambient Experience takes patients on a multimedia ride, letting them personalize the lighting, projected images, and sounds in the examination or lab room. The 10 themes can be selected via a menu on a wireless touch-screen tablet, with more themes on the way. Once picked, the patient's choice is projected on the walls and ceilings and through TV screens, wrapping the user in a multi-sensory setting of his or her own choosing.

So far, the Ambient Experience appears to have had a positive impact on the three patients who earlier sampled it. According to 75-year-old Neo Bee, who was at the cardiac catheterization laboratory to have angioplasty to open her blocked arteries, "I saw birds and kangaroos on the ceiling and there was soothing music, too. I felt calm and relaxed."… Read more

It's no secret that the installed base of technology at large medical facilities needs refreshing, especially as hospitals work toward digitizing medical records.

At St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in New York, a nonprofit with 42 facilities across five boroughs, the constant accessing and updating of patient records through the hospital's shared-bandwidth MPLS network resulted in unacceptable lag time pretty much all day, every day.

So Kane Edupuganti, director of IT Operations & Communications, convinced the higher-ups to retire the hospitals' hundreds of five-plus-year-old desktops and buy more than 600 zero client cubes from Pano Logic.

"… Read more